Lincoln Beach was an amusement park in New Orleans, Louisiana, functioning from 1939 through 1965. The park was for the area's African American population during the Jim Crow era of racial segregation.
Lincoln Beach was located along the shore of Lake Pontchartrain near Little Woods, in a portion of the Eastern New Orleans section of the Ninth Ward of New Orleans that was little developed in the 1930s. The land where Lincoln Beach was located was deeded to the city by Samuel Zemurray in 1938 and purchased within a year by the Orleans Levee Board. The Levee Board first designated this section as a swimming area in the lake for "colored" New Orleanians, then built out additional land in the lake for the amusement park to be built on. The park was similar to the then "whites only" Pontchartrain Beach amusement park, only on a smaller scale. It featured various rides, games, restaurants, a swimming pool in addition to lake swimming, and frequent live music performances. In the last decade, Fats Domino was repeatedly a featured musical act.
Pontchartrain Beach was desegregated in 1964, and business declined rapidly at Lincoln Beach, which, having been rendered obsolete, closed soon afterward. Although there have been various proposals to redevelop the Lincoln Beach site, the decaying ruins of the park have remained vacant for decades. The history of Lincoln Beach is recounted in the book, The Land Was Ours: African American Beaches from Jim Crow to the Sunbelt South (published by Harvard University Press, 2012).
Famous quotes containing the words lincoln, beach, amusement and/or park:
“My old Father used to have a saying that “If you make a bad bargain, hug it the tighter”; and it occurs to me, that if the bargain you have just closed [marriage] can possibly be called a bad one, it is certainly the most pleasant one for applying that maxim to, which my fancy can, by any effort, picture.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“If Los Angeles has been called “the capital of crackpots” and “the metropolis of isms,” the native Angeleno can not fairly attribute all of the city’s idiosyncrasies to the newcomer—at least not so long as he consults the crystal ball for guidance in his business dealings and his wife goes shopping downtown in beach pajamas.”
—For the State of California, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“Storytelling and copulation are the two chief forms of amusement in the South. They’re inexpensive and easy to procure.”
—Robert Penn Warren (b. 1905)
“Mrs. Mirvan says we are not to walk in [St. James’s] Park again next Sunday ... because there is better company in Kensington Gardens; but really, if you had seen how every body was dressed, you would not think that possible.”
—Frances Burney (1752–1840)